The Dictionary of Human Geography

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economic growth, but also to better educa-

tional provision and healthcare delivery,

including for HIV/AIDS patients.

Not everyone agrees with Sachs’ vision of

what causes absolute poverty (he directs a lot

of attention tophysical geography) or his

suggestion that it is best addressed by massive

programmes of public spending (see also

development). Part of the reason for this is

that Sachs is mainly concerned with calorific

or income poverty. Adam Smith famously

argued that a definition of poverty should

include the right not to feel shame in public.

In other words, he recognized that people can-

not function in ways that they might want to if

they are the targets of physical or verbal abuse.

This tradition of thinking has been continued

by John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen.

One virtue of Sen’s (2000) work is that it

directs us to think about poverty in relational

• and not simply absolute – terms. What mat-
  ters, Sen suggests, is whether we have the
  capability to live our lives in ways that we
  consider meaningful, however differently we
  might define what a meaningful life is. This
  is partly qualified, for Sen, by the prior
  requirement that all human beings must have
  a minimal level of food intake, shelter, educa-
  tion and health to function as humans. One
  can imagine a family in Punjab, then, that is
  above a state-defined poverty line. Perhaps the
  family has benefited from rising incomes as a
  result of thegreen revolution. But what if
  females in the family lose paid jobs to male
  kin, perhaps on the basis that their labour in
  the fields is no longer ‘required’? What if this
  loss of earning power translates into a system
  ofpurdah, where women find it harder to ven-
  ture into public space? For Sen, this can also
  be a sign of poverty, precisely because it
  defines a gendered system ofsocial exclu-
  sion. The same argument can be extended to
  members of social groups who are not allowed
  to worship with others, or who cannot easily
  draw water from public wells (Erb and
  Harriss-White, 2002).
  This way of thinking about poverty also dir-
  ects attention to social norms and thus to the
  geographical nature of poverty. In richer coun-
  tries, ‘poverty’ is most commonly defined as
  relative deprivation, and here as elsewhere it
  tends to be feminized (Jones and Kodras,
  1990; but see also Chant, 2006). People are
  considered to be poor relative to some
  assumed bundle of goods or services, or of
  capabilities and functionings, that provides
  for at least a minimum level of access to what
  is considered ‘normal’ in a given social setting.

For example, in the USA, not having a televi-

sion set might be considered an index both of

social exclusion and of relative deprivation, at

least where this is not an active family choice.

Once the word ‘normal’ comes into play, how-

ever, we recognize that ‘wars on poverty’ are

discursive constructions and not just political

campaigns (Yapa, 1998: see discourse).

Social scientists now pay close attention to

the powers ofstateand non-state actors to

define ‘poverty’. They also look at the govern-

mental effects of describing someone as poor

or, as in India, as a Below Poverty Line (BPL)

person or household (Corbridge, Williams,

Srivastava and Ve ́ron, 2005). Work on these

issues is being published alongside academic

research on poverty, inequality andglobal-

izationin the world economy (Wade, 2004;

Wolf, 2004). There is clearly room for both

types of work: for studies that are sharply

attentive to the cultural constructions of pov-

erty and its effects in different locations, and

for studies that carefully seek to map out what

has been happening to absolute poverty in the

developing world (with and without consider-

ations of India and China, whose enormous

size affects all calculations) in an age of appar-

ently increased spatial interdependencies.sco

Suggested readings

Gordon and Spicker (1999); Jones (2004a);

Sachs (2005); World Bank (2001).

poverty gap poverty is conventionally

measured in terms of an Absolute Poverty

Line, expressed in monetary terms: it is the

income or expenditure below which a min-

imum nutritionally adequate diet plus essen-

tial non-food requirements are no longer

affordable (e.g. spending per capita of less

than US$1.00 a day, which is the conventional

measure or threshold for the Absolute Poverty

Line everywhere). A poverty line distin-

guishes, then, the poor from the non-poor

(Ravallion, 1995; UNDP, 1998). Poverty esti-

mates are typically based on data from actual

household budget or income/expenditure

surveys. In this way, a proportion of a coun-

try’s population or an absolute number of per-

sons or households can be designated as living

in absolute poverty: this is theHead Count

Index. Currently, for example, it is estimated

that 47 per cent of the population in Nigeria

live in absolute poverty. Using this Absolute

Poverty Line, it is possible to calculate what

proportion of the GDP of a country would be

required to lift those in absolute poverty above

the poverty line (e.g. the proportion of

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 574 1.4.2009 3:20pm

POVERTY GAP